Amazon caused quite a sensation in the summer of 2011 when they announced the planned release of a new 7 inch tablet with an 8 hour battery life that would run on a particularly customised version of Android and cost somewhat less than $200. When the final specs were disclosed the interest reached fever pitch as it was very similar to the iPad 2 with a 1 GHz dual-core processor and 512 MB RAM. Nonetheless closer inspection and use of the Kindle Fire shows that a long way from being an iPad 2 killer, the Kindle Fire meets a very different role.
The very first thing you will notice when reading thru the Kindle Fire specs is the lack of a lot of the hardware which is common place even on smartphones today. You will not find a camera, mic, GPS, compass or a 3G chip so what you can do with the Kindle Fire is a little limited. Amazon has even cut off access to the Android Marketplace so you can only download authorised programmes from the Kindle Store but before you balk at the idea, the Kindle Store has 16,000 programmes available to download including all the most well-liked tools, resources, office programs and games that you’ll find on the Android Marketplace.
What Amazon has done is make a fascinating hand-held tablet that leverages its vast media library to become the ultimate consumption device. The Kindle Fire isn’t engineered to be a creative tablet like the Samsung Galaxy or the Apple iPad 2, it’s designed to do one thing which is to make it as straightforward as feasible to access Amazon’s database of flicks, TV shows, ebooks, programs and music. To this end, Amazon even sells the Fire at a total loss as it knows it will make up the cost in the long run which goes some way toward explaining the phenomenal retail price.
So the Kindle Fire is a media consumption device then, what does that imply? To start, with Amazon Prime (you get a free month subscription when you purchase the Kindle Fire – read more) you get unrestricted, unlimited access to over 100,000 films and TV shows. You can view them whenever you want, as many times as you would like. By using your WiFi connection the Fire will stream the content to your Kindle device.
You will also get access to Amazon’s Cloud Storage. What this means is that you can upload all the media content that you already own like MP3’s, movies and ebooks and then access it from anywhere using your Kindle Fire (assuming there’s a Wi Fi connection). You don’t have to drag around an external hard drive any more because everything is stored and is accessible from the Internet.
Even though the Kindle Fire is designed as a consumption device that doesn’t suggest that you can’t utilize it for some productivity purposes, as an example you can easily use it to manage your e-mails, you can view reports, spreadsheets and presentations using one of many office programmes that are downloadable and you can use it to update your online calendar.
The Android interface has been totally overhauled by Amazon and it is pretty slick, although compared against the refinement of the iPad 2 user interface the Kindle Fire isn’t quite there yet. It’s quite zippy to navigate around, but again, if you’re used to the iPad 2 you will notice a lot of difference.
At only $200 for such a dynamic gadget which gives you access to so much content the Kindle Fire is going to be one of the must have tablets for 2012.
Check out our website for more great articles on technology topics such as arduino books.
Entries (RSS)